Sadie Gets a Life, 0.3.4 Dev Log, 2026-07-16
The 0.3.3 release has come to a close and I'm hard at work on release 0.3.4. This upcoming release is still ambitious but I should be able to get it done within the standard four-week sprint.
0.3.3 Bug Reports
A pair of bug reports are worth mentioning here. First, the scene where Sadie watches Neemar go fishing has a bug where the scene replays from the start. I have made a map fix available. Download this zip file and replace SadieGetsALife\data\Map169.json with the extracted map file. This will also go into the 0.3.4 release.
There is another bug where the "Broker a Deal" Isekai Order mission gets stuck on the "Enter the warehouse" step. That's more of a cosmetic issue, so 0.3.4 will have the fix for that but I don't have a breakfix for 0.3.3 users.
Colton's Training Academy, Part 2
The second scenario for Colton's Training Academy will be out in 0.3.4. There will be three scenarios in total, and they'll slowly build up some of the tactical RPG mechanics that will come into their own during Act IV. My goal is to have a few scenarios here and a few in the second half of Act III. By the point Act III ends, players will have a handle on the tactical motif just as it becomes more important to the overall game.
Negotiations
One of the tasks that I had for 0.3.4 was intended to be a small bonus if you did well in Act II and successfully negotiated a peace treaty with the Eastern Duchy. In that case, some merchants from the Freistadt would reach out to Sadie and there would be some small benefit to national prestige and maybe a trinket or two as she works out a trade deal.
As I started fleshing out the story, I ended up with, well, this:
I've created a negotiations plugin that implements a new game mechanic. The idea is that Sadie will negotiate on behalf of some party (perhaps even her traveling party) against some other group. In this case, she's negotiating on behalf of the Monster Kingdom against the Freistadt Mercantile League.
Both sides start pretty far apart in their negotiations: the FML starts at 0 on our number line, and the Monster Kingdom wants 200. There's a minimum threshold for negotiations to succeed, so in this case, Sadie needs to get at least 45 space bucks (it would represent "utils" but then Dinestra would get angry) to make the deal acceptable to her party.
The conceit with this negotiation game is that Sadie can perform certain actions in order to move the needle. In the above scenario, the Monster Kingdom could shift soldiers over to convoy duty, preventing bandits from stealing goods en route. This leads to more goods making it to their final destination and both sides prosper. But this particular deal comes with a cost: accepting it caps the maximum possible gains the Monster Kingdom could earn.
From this, you can (and perhaps should) conclude that there will be several options available to you. Some of these will be good options, some of them bad. It's up to you to decide which options you want to take.
In addition to those views for individual quests, there is also an overview screen. This screen gives you an idea of where you're at (the green 60 in this case), the potential negotiating space (60-180 right now), and a breakdown of how you got there. We accepted Thaddeus's support to get +30, and assigned guards for convoys, which gives another +30 but costs the Monster Kingdom 20 potential points in the process.
Once you cross the threshold, you can settle for the negotiation value closest to your opponent's starting point. in this case, we have a potential space of 60-180 but would have to settle for 60. That may sound unfair, but at the same time, Sadie doesn't send FML members off on missions to move the needle back in their favor. I should also note that I've coded for scenarios where our negotiation window inverts: in other words, if we have +150 for the FML but -110 from the Monster Kingdom, our settlement bonus will be 90 and not 150. This reflects the idea of overhead costs, expensive promises, or dangerous compromises affecting the bottom line and preventing Sadie's party from getting the full benefit of their negotiations.
Some of these options will require "field work," in which Sadie has to perform a specific task in order to get the points. In the first image above, merely accepting the mission would be enough to shift those points, as that represents changing the Monster Kingdom government's military policy and boils down to her saying "Okay, we'll do that." By contrast, sabotaging a convoy requires Sadie to go out and get her hands dirty. This will show up as a normal quest in the quest log. That means these sorts of missions will take some time to complete, but the results are usually better than the simple point-and-click options.
What Else?
There's a lot more coming to 0.3.4, but I need to save something for next week's log. Still, I'll give you two more things. First, if you decided not to have Sadie pursue Landon at the beginning of Act III, I'm going to introduce a way for the two to get together. This will open up the Make a Man content for people who want it.
And second, the Jacob Saunders intrigue continues. Several quests in 0.3.4 will involve this man and his plethora of wives. But you'll have to wait a few weeks to find out exactly what those quests entail.